We look forward to Matter’s arrival in the connected home. It is the promise to end the atomization and dispersion of a large number of devices for the home, which with this new standard will be able to interact more easily. The plan is on the table and now it is the companies that have to start updating and launching products and Aqara is one of them.
Matter what it will do is that products that until now, worked under different platforms, can interact together, regardless of whether they have been launched to work with Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit… and now Aqara explains how a large part of your catalog will work with Matter and when it will be possible to do it with the Hub M2 as a key.
Matter for everyone but with reservations
The company has detailed in a video, the one you see on these lines, as Matter Coming to 40+ Zigbee-based Aqara Devices. And the first step is support for using Matter on the Aqara M2, the brand’s hub for using its devices.
Aqara announces that will release an update to bring the use of Matter to its hubs or Hub M2. First to the M2s manufactured in 2022 and sold outside of China, so in about four to six weeks all M2 hubs should have version V4.0.0 (beta).
In this way, any user who has updated will be able to use Matter by selecting “Bind to Matter” after receiving the firmware update on your M2 hub.
The new firmware to be released by the company focuses on the M2 hub and It is not intended to update Aqara devices individually to make them compatible with Thread. In fact, and as they say in The Verge, Aqara has devices that support Matter out of the box.
In the video that the company has released as a tutorial, it explains how the devices connected to the Hub M2 will work After the update and by the way, it also informs about what the limitations were while mate, it does not extend to the rest of the devices in the connected place.
With the new firmware, those who work with Google Home and Apple Home will be able to view Aqara devices connected to the M2 hub after upgradingwhile those using Amazon Alexa or Samsung SmartThings will work as soon as they support the Bridge device type.
Of course, they warn users of the Apple Home app not to switch to Matter right now since “Matter cannot provide the full functionality of HomeKit” alleging duplication of devices or messages about connection failures. At the same time that it warns in this regard, it also informs that after updating to Matter it will not be necessary to reset the devices.
For Google Home users with Aqara devices at home, these they can update without fear and continue to use an Android phone with the Google Home app Google Home or Nest device as a Matter controller.
Via | The Verge